NEW DELHI: The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation presented the ‘Global Goalkeeper Award’ to Narendra Modi, Prime Minister of India, today morning in New York, on September 25, for the ‘Swachh Bharat Abhiyan’ launched by the government. The ‘Swachh Bharat Mission’ or ‘Clean India Mission’ was one of the first few ambitious projects launched by PM Modi.
PM Modi, in a series of tweets said, “Getting the award in the year of Mahatma Gandhi’s 150th birth anniversary is personally significant for me. When 130 crore people take a pledge, any challenge can be overcome.”
“No such campaign was seen or heard about in any other country in the recent past. It might have been launched by our government, but people took control of it,” Modi added.
Highlighting the success of the ‘Swachh Bharat Mision’ PM Modi said that it could not be measured in numbers, the poor people and the women of India were benefitted the most by it.
Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation had also reported that with improvement in rural sanitation in India, it had led to a decline in heart problems among children and improvement in the Body Mass Index (BMI) among women, said PM Modi.
PM Modi further said that Gandhiji used to say a village could only become a model when it was completely clean. Today we are heading towards making the entire country a model.
The cleanliness campaign was launched by the PM Modi during its first tenure on October 2, 2014.